Developers told: Get your heads out of last century

The local software industry has been told that it must change its mindset in software development if it is to cope with the challenges of Asean Economic Community in 2015.

The chairman of Software Park Thailand’s board, Manoo Ordeedolchest, said the local industry had to refocus on software design.

 

Software is now emerging as a potential area in which Thailand will be able to compete, when the open regional market begins, rather than telecom services or hardware.

 

However, while the process of software development has changed, many software developers remain “stuck in the mindset of the last century”, and they continue to develop software and applications to serve physical business transactions. This must change to a focus on software serving digital transactions, Manoo said.

 

He said the new era of software development was focused first on the needs of end-users. Software services in the era of cloud computing and social networking have the characteristics of no time, no space and no matter. This means users can perform business transactions, empowered by software, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

 

“Instead of developing software to serve businesses’ back-office systems, with the aim of helping organisations to increase their efficiency, software development is now aimed at helping organisations to increase their productivity and competitiveness, and that means helping them to minimise the ‘transaction costs’ of any service,” Manoo said.

 

He warned that if Thai software companies remained stuck with an “expired mindset” they would lose in the new business-software game – especially in the single market of AEC 2015.

The government should be helping to create awareness of the new software-development mindset and also providing support to encourage change in the local software industry, which is made up mostly of small- and medium-sized enterprises.

 

“For instance, understanding the process of any business transaction is powerful knowledge that can help developers to successfully create software and applications to serve users’ needs,” he said.

 

Moreover, the government should set up a social network to conduct crowdsourcing in the software industry and to develop human-resources management. This will help to integrate the strength of local software companies, so that together, they can compete with software developers from overseas.

 

Social networking is also a phenomenon that software developers must understand in order to develop software to help their customers get the most out of utilizing social networks. 

 

“Social networking is now playing an important role on the business bandwagon. Software developers need to understand this first, and then they have to embed a social-network philosophy into their software services and applications,” Manoo said.

 

Cloud computing is another key factor crafting the new way of software development. Developers should focus on software design and development to serve this new environment. Operating from a cloud-computing platform, software-as-a-service is a crucial model for software service providers. Additionally, software developers should think of developing software and applications to serve mobile devices, Manoo said.

 

All these factors, from changes in the new era of technology and the way people are doing business to the way people are communicating and connecting with others, are things that software developers have to keep in mind when designing and developing software and applications, he said.